I’m currently working on a rather simple Todo list application intended to meet the requirements I outlined earlier. I’m developing this as an offline-enabled webapp and while I haven’t gotten very far (don’t try it, it barely satisfies the most elemental requirements), I have some interesting observations to make:

First, the app is currently 100% Javascript. Its wrapped in a Django project because I’m going to have to make it online enabled at some point, but I wrote this app from the ground up to run in offline mode. This is a huge departure from traditional web 2.0 development (as of now, web 2.0 is to be considered ‘traditional’), where logic is mostly stored on the server and an ugly mess of ajax calls run that business logic on different events. Instead, I have a Javascript app that is surprisingly elegant. MVC under this architecture is basically SQLite (model), XHTML/CSS (view), and javascript (controller). Then I will have a workerpool to sync up with the server in the background.

As a result, the entire code-base for this app is being served to the web browser. So if you personally want to hack this app, you can download the source files from the browser. Basically, I can’t release this app as closed source. I could put a license on it forbidding you to modify or redistribute it, but you can still read the code; the source is open.

Of course, that’s not a problem for me, as I release most of my code as open source and its already up on github. But it could kill corporate migration toward offline-enabled web 3.0. Because while its one thing to keep your trade secrets locked up on the server and provide a few incoherent javascript calls that interact with that API, it is a completely different beast to put your entire app available for download as a .js file.

I suspect the open source movement has gained enough momentum that any companies who have these fears will simply be put out of business by more modern outfits that will spring up to take their place. Otherwise, either web 3.0 will fail to grab market share, or somebody will come up with a way to ‘compile’ javascript into a standards compliant byte-code so they can pretend nobody can reverse engineer their app. This would be a damn shame as its a politically-motivated technically useless layer of complexity on a web based architecture that I am finally happy to be working with.